Traits of Highly Creative People

Here is a much less superficial article from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who has extensively studied highly creative people:<p><a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-personality" rel="nofollow">http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-...</a><p><i>If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."</i>

From my personal point of view, while certainly creativity has nothing to do with intelligence, it does however -- as with anything -- come down to an essential fondness of the act itself; something which I believe is very much innate.<p>Anyone can be creative. It's not an exclusive trait, and you can learn to play upon it and master it to some degree. For most people though, the creative act <i>doesn't do it for them</i> as it does for the creative person. And you can't learn to love something.<p>I consider myself a somewhat creative person. When I play the guitar for instance, making melodies and compositions is perhaps more a compulsive need than anything else. (I hope this doesn't come off as self glorification; but it's not all a good behavior either.) I've also had ambitions with art projects and forced myself to work, and conclusively shown myself that results never get as good as when you act spontaneously out of the joy and pleasure of creating, whatever big and strong visions.

Creativity can be found in all walks of life, there are creative doctors, lawyers, accounts (well..), programmers etc. To be exceptional in your field, I think you have to leverage some element of creativity to stand out amongst a plethora of mediocrity. Creativity doesn't necessarily imply the arts, design, et al.<p>I do believe creativity can be fine-tuned and improved over time, but my experience has been that most people don't have enough of it. I do think there is some nature/DNA involved.

For me the axioms of creativity are:<p>1. Change the axioms<p>2. Go meta on the axioms<p>So, if you change these axioms you're going to be creatively creative. How meta.<p>In conclusion, this comment is very creative.

<a href="http://artequalswork.com/2008/11/a-case-for-logic/" rel="nofollow">http://artequalswork.com/2008/11/a-case-for-logic/</a>

No source, no validity.